An epileptic writing about epilepsy, the brain, and perception

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I’ve noted over my lifetime that after a long bout of a surge in epilepsy, as the brain settles down and its plasticity begins repairing and reconnecting things, that new memories well up, in scattered bits and small pieces of past times. They pop up in anecdotes, unconnected, details I’d forgotten or entire events, people I hadn’t thought of in years, memories of sensations long past. It’s always disconcerting but it’s fun too. When you lose long term memories you don’t really notice. They’re just not there anymore. If it happens a lot over your entire adult life it doesn’t bother you much at all. You don’t miss what you no longer know you had. It’s not like you suddenly can’t remember something. You don’t know you ever remembered it at all. It’s only when you’re around people talking old times and you have no clue what they’re talking about that it gets disconcerting. Otherwise you’d never notice at all. Memory loss is a lot more disturbing to those who do remember than to those who can’t.

Which is what makes these sudden refound memories so oddly disconcerting. Things that were no longer there are instantly there again, bits and pieces of your past existence so vivid, so real, in full color. You can hear the voices, feel the feelings. You can almost reach out and touch them. They’re all non-sequitors, of course, it’s not like you’ve recovered complete files on your hard drive. These are just almost randomly placed memories that have been reconnected by a newly repaired or rerouted neural connection. Memories are “stored” in different places all over the brain, and any neural rewiring is bound to uncover a few, though not in any organized or systematic patterns I’ve ever noticed. They’re just random remembrances, like finding a drawer full of old post cards and Polaroids. Just anecdotes. I’ll bring them up a couple at a time in conversation so they don’t throw anybody—if you suddenly begin remembering too much stuff at once people get weirded out (people are very easily weirded out), or they spring up in vividly detailed emails or Facebook posts or blog entries. If I write them down the memory hardens, if I merely talk about them they can blow away, though sometimes I’m not sure how much that I’m writing is what I actually remember and how much is me fleshing out the details to make the writing prettier. In the end it comes down to what makes a good story, I suppose, and none of you readers will know any better or care if the writing is good enough, and the refound memory hardens into the usual mortar of fact and fiction that binds human memory together anyway.

Just spent the afternoon working out next month’s budget down to the estimated dollar amount we will have available by day. This is the way I handled our budget a decade ago. Two years ago I couldn’t even balance the bank account, let alone think ahead more than a day or two. The epilepsy recovery is coming along nicely. On the downside I can’t safely write more than a couple paragraphs, and multi-tasking makes my brain fritz and spark and sputter. But I’m not complaining. This is heaven.

Brain tissue is a problem, but new brain pathways do spring up. Also, the current research seems to indicate that music thinking is a precursor to language, so it’s deeply embedded.

Well, those new synaptic pathways are also a problem for epileptics, as synapses connect in ways they shouldn’t and rerouting around synapses that should be connecting, thereby sundering the neuronal pathways to parts of the brain. It’s as if a neuron that had one hundred possible connections now has only five possible connections. If you imagine each synapse as a door to another room, suddenly ninety-five rooms have been locked shut, and everything within them is now unavailable forever. That is the impact partial seizures have on our brains, a few neurons at a time. When you realize that entire behaviors can be the result of a handful of connected neurons, it is amazing just what can be lost with even a virtually invisible seizure. A seizure is like a power surge in an electrical system, arcing currents and burning out circuits and wires and damaging machinery. As the temporal lobe seems to be much more vulnerable to this than the frontal lobe, every time an epileptic has a partial TLE seizure, some of the pathways are sundered and information is lost forever. Most we are not aware of. It can take decades to realize things are missing, though I’m sure the vast majority we have no idea we lost at all, simply because you can’t remember what you no longer remember.

The plasticity of the brain defies belief…a woman born without a Cerebellum and not diagnosed till age 24. Which means that even though the genes that would normally be involved in cerebellum development were missing (actually they were there, they were just unable to perform this set of tasks), other genes were able to use other parts of the brain to perform the cerebellum’s tasks. The brain is able to function the way a drummer lays down a complex web of polyrhythms. That is, a drummer has two feet and two hands, but is able to create varying patterns by combining elements of the same hands and foot pedals striking in different but simultaneous patterns. And the brain can use the same neurons in varying patterns by making varying combinations of neurons…a neuron firing can fire off other neurons simultaneously so one neuron can be part of various chains of neurons performing various functions. It’s insanely complex.

I suspect this woman needs more fuel to keep at her peak alertness since a smaller brain means that neurons are firing more often and burning through the cells stores of potassium and manganese (which are what neurons use to spark) than a healthy brain. My wife has recovered remarkably from being without a heartbeat for four minutes, but her thinking fades if she fails to eat properly throughout the day. That’s because she lost a few million neurons when oxygen stopped being delivered to the brain, and since then her brain has recovered most of its former capabilities through plasticity–other neurons taking over. But those neurons are now being used more, which means they are firing more, which means they run low on the fuel–potassium and manganese, mostly–faster than they did prior to her heart stoppage.

A ten year old told me about this story. Brains are so cool, she said.

The plasticity of the brain defies belief…a woman born without a cerebellum and not diagnosed till age 24. Which means that even though the genes that would normally be involved in cerebellum development were missing (actually they were there, they were just unable to perform this set of tasks), other genes were able to use other parts of the brain to perform the cerebellum’s tasks. The brain is able to function the way a drummer lays down a complex web of polyrhythms. That is, a drummer has two feet and two hands, but is able to create varying patterns by combining elements of the same hands and foot pedals striking in different but simultaneous patterns. And the brain can use the same neurons in varying patterns by making varying combinations of neurons…a neuron firing can fire off other neurons simultaneously so one neuron can be part of various chains of neurons performing various functions. It’s insanely complex.

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My latest writing on: Brick Wahl

Was out on the moondeck around midnight and the silence was something. A solitary siren set off the coyotes and for a minute there I could have been in the middle of the Mojave, but the siren keened away and the coyotes shushed. A bat fluttered by. An owl flapped from one tree to another […]

This Canter’s Rueben ought to make up for all the vegetarian meals I usually eat. I suppose the pickle is the vegan part. And there’s enough oil in these onion rings for a whole weekend of orgies. Slippin’ and a slidin’, gotta wash my hands. The pickle just squirted all across the table, iPad, and […]

My latest writing on: Brick's Science

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Listening to these mockingbirds improv reminds me of a factoid I read today in Daniel Tammet’s Embracing the Wide Sky that in order for male songbirds to sing some of the incredibly complex songs which change constantly, up to one per cent of the neurons in their song center are replaced by new neurons every […]

My latest writing on: Brick's History

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My latest writing on: Brick's Politics

Hoover flags, they called empty pockets in 1931, and they became emblematic of Herbert Hoover’s abject failure in dealing with the Great Depression. I suspect homemade face masks are becoming Trump’s Hoover Flags.

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My latest writing on: Brick's Picks

Found this in my drafts, completely forgotten. I only found it again when one of these bits–Walking About–wound up on a tee shirt in Australia. Seems I had once spent a late evening on YouTube digging up old tunes from my past life and writing about them. They’re not for the jazzbos, most of ’em, they’re […]

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